


That Which We Call a Rose

by MagitekUnit05953234



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Death is not described, Hurt/Comfort, I promise the ending will be happy, M/M, Original Character Death(s), this is not the story you expect it to be
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-11
Updated: 2019-01-11
Packaged: 2019-10-08 11:12:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17385407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagitekUnit05953234/pseuds/MagitekUnit05953234
Summary: As he lays safe and sound in bed, Noct wonders if there’s any meaning to this life, if it’s one where such terrible things can happen.





	That Which We Call a Rose

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the AU that you think it is. 
> 
> Thank you to [Tauri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tauricxiv/profile) and [Nicoleiacross/Kiri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicoleiacross/profile) for sparking this with their great ideas.

Noctis wakes to his phone blaring beside his pillow, rousing him from sleep for the ninth time so far this morning. He squints at the screen, gauging whether the rush he will be in is worth the extra five minutes of sleep.

“Oh my god, Noct. You gotta get up. It’s time to _go_.”

While being on time sounds great and all, Noct would much rather sleep than go to class. He stuffs his face into his pillow, pulls his blanket over his head, and turns toward the wall.

“Noct, I swear to god I am going to come over there and drag you out of bed. Don’t think I won’t. I’ve done it before and will do it again.”

“Go without me,” Noct mumbles. “I’m tired.”

“No way! We get attendance grades for that class, man. You can probably sleep if you sit in the back. You just gotta show up!”

“Will you wake me up if Hellman gets suspicious?” Noct sighs and rolls back over, tentatively tugging his blanket back down and glaring at the sunbeams on the ceiling.

“Always do. Now come on, let’s get _going_. You don’t even gotta dress —just make sure you have pants on and put on a sweatshirt or something. It’s a gen ed, no one cares.”

“Fine, fine,” Noct slides out of bed and stifles a yawn. “One of these days you’ll let me skip.”

“No way, man. I’m not suffering through Hellman’s alone and you’re the only person I know in there.”

“Make new friends. Expand your horizons,” Noct pulls on the sweatshirt he wore a few days ago and slips on his shoes. He usually isn’t a big fan of going to class in his pajama pants, but he probably will be late if bothers to find something better. “Always better fish in the sea, right?”

“Oh, shut up!” Jaden grabs hold of Noct’s sleeve and starts pulling him to the door. “Grab your laptop and let’s _go_.”

Noct snatches the handle of his laptop bag, prays to no one in particular that the computer inside is actually charged enough to make it through class, and lets himself be dragged along to English 110. It’s easily one of his least favorite courses, purely because of how much writing is involved, but he has to pass it to graduate so he has to suffer through it.

“Oh jeez,” Jaden says as they round the corner to the Jackson Building’s English corridor. “That definition paper wasn’t due today, was it?”

“I have no idea,” Noct vaguely remembers starting it but he knows he never got very far. “I’m screwed if it is.”

“Me too,” Jaden commiserates. “I haven’t even started it yet.”

Luckily enough, they make it to class on time and the paper _isn’t_ due today. It’s due in two days, which is hardly an improvement but Noct isn’t half bad at scraping up a decent word count if a deadline’s staring him in the face. Jaden’s in a very visible yet quiet form of panic for quite a bit after he checks the syllabus, but Noct is pretty sure he sees Jaden start writing his paper as Hellman’s lecture begins. Noct tries to take notes for the both of them, though he’s never been that great at making those even vaguely coherent.

About ten minutes into the lecture, Noct’s mind starts to wander. He isn’t exactly tired enough to fall asleep, but his focus is absolutely shot. He leaves the notes document open on his laptop for appearance’s sake, but scoots the computer slightly to the side so he has room to get out his sketchbook and doodle.

Noctis is hesitant to call himself an artist in any official capacity, but ever since he was eighteen or so he draws whenever he can’t focus on other tasks. He eventually bought himself a sketchbook so he could keep all his little drawings collected, because he is always loathe to throw away anything he draws and keeping scraps of napkins and paper menus got really old after a while. He flips through the pages and settles on one that is only half filled and lets his pencil wander over the paper.

This page is partly filled with sketches of a man that Noctis has never met —not in real life, anyway. All the drawings in this notebook are people that Noctis has never seen in anywhere but weird dreams that he started having when he was right around the age of sixteen. They pretty much replaced all his normal dreams —both the fun ones and nightmares— though sometimes they’re kinda like nightmares on their own. He’s never told anyone about them, though sometimes he wishes he would. They feel like some sort of sacred little secret though, with a magic that would maybe go away if he ever said anything. It isn’t as if he remembers all the details anyway, just snatches of people and places and events he doesn’t recognize or understand.

So, he draws what he’s been seeing for the past four years —a world he’s only ever dreamed. Today, it’s the blond guy with a million freckles. He’s different ages in each sketch on this page, but never gets beyond a vague thirty years or so. Noct doesn’t really know why he can never visualize this guy any older than that or younger than like twelve, but at this point he just goes with it. As it is, he draws this guy most often around Noct’s age. He’s a bit of a beanpole, with weirdly styled hair, and a myriad of bracelets around his wrists that remind Noct of the kids he used to go to high school with that practically lived and breathed Hot Topic. Granted, Noct _was_ one of those kids, but he likes to think he was more subtle about it.

Noct makes it through the rest of Hellman’s lecture by a hair, as it turns out. Even drawing wasn’t enough to keep his head from nodding by the end of the hour, though he managed not to doze too much. It was thanks to Jaden’s light pinches on Noct’s left arm that kept him from falling asleep and probably drooling all over his sketchbook.

“Glad that’s over,” Jaden says just a touch too loud as they file out of the lecture hall, earning a dirty look from Hellman. Jaden, absolutely oblivious to the daggers being sent to him via tenured eyes, stretches his arms over his head. “We’re free ‘til Thursday, now!”

“Can I go back to bed?” Noct asks, mostly joking but also kinda not.

“Aw come on,” Jaden nudges Noct in the side with an elbow. “Don’t be that way! I promised I’d buy you lunch today. Why don’t we borrow Bryce’s car, we can go to —oh _shit_!”

Jaden falls forward, his hands barely darting out in time to stop him from smashing his face on the off-color tile. Noct stops dead, nearly tripping himself, and holds out a hand to help Jaden up. “Damn, what happened? You good?”

“I dunno,” Jaden brushes off his denim jacket after he regains his footing. He unzips his laptop bag and cracks open his computer as much as he can without taking it out. “Lost my balance I guess. Looks like my laptop screen’s okay though which is great. I would have literally died if I broke that thing.”

“You would not,” Noct rolls his eyes as Jaden gets his shit together.

“Probably would want to though,” Jaden accompanies his sad joke with double finger guns. “For real though, I’m buying you lunch and you’re not allowed to fall asleep on me. Just let me text Bryce. He totally owes me from when I bought his girlfriend that video game because he ran out of money on her birthday. You remember that?”

“Vaguely,” Noct shrugs. “I don’t talk to Bryce that much.”

Jaden bows his head over his phone, tapping out texts instead of looking where he’s going. Noct gently steers him around other students as they make their way to the elevators and wait for the lift down to the ground floor. After they doors slide open and they shuffle in beside a group of what are probably business majors judging off the way they’re dressed. It’s as if every business major lives out of the same closet.

“Got it,” Jaden waggles his phone in front of Noct’s face. “We get his car ‘til six, ‘cause then he needs it back to go to Reroll. I think there’s a tournament there tonight.”

“Alright,” Noct says as the door opens. “So where are we going?”

>\- XV -<

“Are you ever gonna make that comic or are you just gonna sit on those characters forever?” Jaden asks, halfway through his burger. “And what on _Earth_ are you eating? Is that really all you’re getting?”  
“Don’t knock it. It’s good,” Noct gestures vaguely with a fry retrieved from a plate containing nothing _but_ more fries and a liberal dollop of ketchup on the side. “Just because _you_ don’t eat fries… wait, what comic?”

“Well, isn’t that what you’re working on? A comic or something like that?” Jaden theorizes. “You never like, talk about it but you’ve been drawing the same three dudes since high school. They’ve gotta be characters for something, right?”

“Oh,” Noct finishes his fry and fiddles with the pile of the rest. For some reason, the mere idea that those men are just fictional characters really grates on him. “I dunno. I just draw them. I don’t have a story or anything.”

That feels patently false, given the loose connection all his dreams sort to share, but it isn’t something he made up on his own and is definitely never something he’s going to write out, so. There’s that.

“You should make one,” Jaden says. “I know you’re not an art major or nothing, but it’d be a cool project. I’d read it.”

“I’m not an anything major.”

“Can’t be undeclared forever,” Jaden says. “I finally picked what _I’m_ majoring in, by the way. Did I tell you that?”

Noct leans forward. In all the years he’s known Jaden, his friend has never had the vaguest clue what he’s wanted to do with his life. He actively tried to get out of going to college, but at his mom’s insistence he ended up applying for the same state school Noct did and got in. “No way. What is it?”

“Minecraft,” Jaden winks, then takes an unnecessarily big bite out of his burger. “Gonna make millions once I’m outta college. That kind of degree gets you anywhere.”

“Oh my god,” Noct barely resists the urge to throw something at Jaden, settling for shaking his head instead. “How’d your mom like that one?”

“She laughed and then told me to get my life together,” Jaden says after swallowing the ridiculous amount of food he just shoved in his mouth. “But like, lovingly. She’s chill. How’s your uncle doing, by the way?”

“Fine, I guess,” Noct shrugs. “I haven’t talked to him that much since classes started back up. He wants me to come back for Thanksgiving, though.”

“You should,” Jaden winks again, but something about the movement feels off. “Victor’s super cool. I wish he was _my_ uncle.”

“You only say that because he’s not. You don’t have to live with him.”

“Maybe so,” Jaden pops the last bit of burger in his mouth and pushes his plate away. “I think I’m ready to go back. I’ve got a wild headache coming on.”

“Alright,” Noct glances up at the counter near the front of the restaurant, where their waiter is brewing a new pot of coffee. Noct nods his head in that direction. “Hey, maybe you should get a cup for the road? Might be a caffeine headache since you haven’t had any today.”

“Could be,” Jaden groans and sets his chin down in his hands, closing his eyes. “I really don’t like to drink anything while I’m driving, though. It’s a distraction.”

“I’ll drive. You just drink your coffee and take a nap or something.”

“Bryce didn’t say you could drive his car, though.”

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

>\- XV -<

Things seem fine once they’re back in their dorm. Things seem normal. Noct and Jaden share the lukewarm remains of Noct’s fries from his to-go box as they recline on Noct’s bed, back against the wall and laptops warm on their laps.

“You have any idea what the hell this is asking for?” Noct turns his screen toward Jaden, who squints at it and eventually just shakes his head.

“It keeps telling me I’m wrong even though I’m almost certain I’m not messing it up. I think it’s glitching.”

“That’s a first,” Noct flips through the maths textbook he has laying open on the blankets next to him. “God, this class sucks ass. I hate it so much.”

“Me too, man. I’m losing my fucking mind over here,” Jaden closes his laptop and rubs at his temples. “Wow, I wish this headache would go away. That coffee did absolutely nothing.”

“Did you take anything for it?” Noct slides his own laptop off his lap and makes his way to the corner of their dorm room that is vaguely designated as a kitchen despite its contents comprising of nothing but a cheap minifridge, a microwave Noct brought from home, and hot plate. He pokes through the stacked organizational bins that line the right side of the fridge, looking for the one where their paltry supply of medicine is kept. “I think we have some advil here or something.”

“I took the last of it like, last week,” Jaden gets up and scoots around Noct to start his own search. “I haven’t bought more yet.”  
“What’re you looking over here for, then?”

“We’ve got emetrol, don’t we? I’m feeling kinda nauseous.”

Noct pauses, casting a cautious eye over Jaden. He _does_ look kinda bad off now that he really looks. “I think so. Are you doing okay? Are you getting sick?”

“I dunno,” Jaden frowns, then gags. “Eugh. Oh god, that was gross.”

“You better not get me sick,” Noct says, though he nudges Jaden’s shoulder as he does. “I’ve got class tomorrow.”

“Yeah yeah,” Jaden finds the emetrol bottle and forgoes the little measuring cup, waterfalling what is probably a dose and a half directly into his mouth. He screws the cap back on with one hand and gives Noct a thumbs up with the other as he swallows. “Wow, that stuff’s terrible.”

He makes it the next three seconds before gagging again and pushing past Noct and speedwalking to the washroom and closing the door behind him. Noct winces at the sounds that the door does nothing to muffle. There’s a bit of quiet after that, broken by the sink tap running. Noct approaches the door and knocks lightly on it. “Hey. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Jaden replies. He sounds a little out of it, and Noct’s hand inches toward the doorknob without him really thinking about it. “Yeah, I’m good I think. Just a little dizzy.”

“I think you should go to the doctor,” Noct suggests.

His answer is the crash of Jaden falling to the floor behind the door, out cold.

>\- XV -<

“This is super fucked up,” Jaden says without preamble. He’s been sitting in silence for all of ten minutes now after the doctor left, staring blankly at the dark tv screen mounted from the ceiling.

“Yeah,” Noct swallows back the tightness in his throat. “You gonna be okay?”

“Don’t have a choice, right?” Jaden smiles weakly. “It’s that or uh. Actually die so. I know what option I’m going— oh my god. I’m gonna have to drop my classes aren’t I?”

“They’ve got online classes, right? Maybe they’ll let you switch to those.”

“God, I hope so. I paid way too much to have to straight-up drop everything now. I don’t think they’re giving refunds this late in the semester.”

Noct would be lying if he said he wasn’t stressed as hell. The frantic scramble to get to the hospital after the ambulance took Jaden was maybe the worst experience of his life, followed up by the doctor quietly informing Jaden that Jaden had an inoperable brainstem glioma.

_Removing the tumors entirely is impossible given their location in the mid-portion in the brainstem. While some control of their growth is possible, control is all that can be done._

Noct feels like he’s going to be sick. He’s known Jaden since middle school, when they had the same history class and bonded over making fun of the more ridiculous parts of the Middle Ages. As they got older they hopped from interest to interest, but always did so together. Their obsession with punk rock, their embarrassing anime phase, their fleeting interest in cross country that withered after the first conditioning day. They’ve been practically attached at the hip for so long and now Jaden’s really ill. He’s ill and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, in the end. He can’t come back from this.

Shit.

“Hey man, don’t look like that,” Jaden leans forward and pats Noct on the arm. “It’ll be fine. Nothing’s ever stopped me before.”

They leave the hospital with a few prescription papers and with orders not to leave Jaden alone lest he faint and crack his head open on the floor. Jaden spends the car ride back —in Bryce’s car once again, this time acquired with a lot more panic on Noct’s part— looking up how to withdraw from his classes without losing all the money he and his mom put into enrolling him in them.

“Well hey,” Jaden says as campus comes up on the horizon. “At least I can go hang out with Victor since I’m going back to Bloomington. It’ll be awesome.”

“You’re gonna hang out with _my_ uncle?”

“Duh. He’s cool,” Jaden sets his phone down and holds out his hands, the movement barely visible out of the corner of Noct’s eye. “He’s got a sword collection. That’s pretty damn cool.”

“It just means he was a nerd in like 2004, man. He liked Bleach or whatever.”

The air conditioning unit in the car sputters and turns off. It’s been known for doing that, but this is the first time Noct’s had to deal with it.

“Hey,” Jaden says. His voice is suddenly grave. “Hey, Noct. Can I tell you something?”

“Yeah,” Noct feels a chill sweep across his skin. “Yeah, anything Jay.”

“I just wanted to say that, like. If I don’t have a lot of time left I might as well be honest…”

Noct bites his lip, waiting for the conclusion to Jaden’s confession.

“If I’m telling the truth? I never stopped liking Bleach.”

“Oh my god you can’t do that to me,” Noct, without looking away from the road, swats at Jaden with his right hand. “All that shit about not having a lot of time left. Don’t _do_ that!”

“Sorry,” Jaden snickers, sounding about as unapologetic as possible.

When they pull into Bryce’s parking spot and get out of the car, Noct wonders whether he should be helping Jaden around or something. He doesn’t really have much of an idea of what to do in this situation at all.

“I’ve gotta call my mom and talk to her about all this,” Jaden declares on the elevator ride up to their dorm floor. “Since I’m gonna have to go home.”

“Want me to leave you be?”

“Yes please.”

>\- XV -<

Life is absolutely terrible without Jaden around. Noct hates to say it, but he is a bit of a disaster of a human being. Jaden is really his only good friend, and is certainly the only reason Noct ever attended every class on time and vaguely finished his assignments before the absolute last minute. Now that Jaden’s back home resting and getting treatment and Noct is unexpectedly the only person responsible for his own life, things are going to hell when it comes to Noct’s attendance and grades.

It’s lonely, too. Noct never realized just how used to having someone sleeping across the room from him he got. Jaden was almost ever-present in his life, and now that he’s not around it’s like there’s a big hole where he is meant to be and it keeps sucking the life out of everything Noct tries to do to distract himself from it. Sure, they text every day and facetime each other at least once or twice a week, but it isn’t the same.

Tonight, Noct is trying and failing to get ahead on a synthesis essay for Hellman before he ends up facing down the deadline with nothing to turn in. He has fifteen tabs of sources pulled up on his laptop and has absorbed absolutely no information from any of them. The words swim and blur before his eyes, and he puts his head down next to his mouse.

“What’d I do to deserve this?” Noct wonders aloud, granting himself a few moments’ self pity.

It is then that his phone begins to ring. It isn’t the usual eleven thirty alarm to wake Noct up when he falls asleep doing homework, so he actually picks up the phone to look at it instead of pressing the sleep button and muting the notification. Jaden hasn’t talked to him in the last two days, after all. He’s probably calling to apologize for losing his phone again. He does it a lot.

The number isn’t one Noct recognizes, but it has his old Bloomington area code. He doesn’t usually answer these types of calls since they’re almost always bots, but this time he does. Something feels different about tonight.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” the voice that answers is a woman, who Noct feels like he should probably know. “Is this Noctis Suzuki?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” the woman takes a deep breath, loudly enough that Noct can hear it over the phone. “We haven’t spoken in a while, but I’m Jaden’s mother. Are you free right now?”

Noct freezes. He slams his laptop closed and turns his chair away from it, curling into his phone. “Yeah, yeah I’m free. Is everything okay? He hasn’t talked to me in a few days.”

Ms. Collins bursts into tears.

Noctis watches the moonlight travel across his ceiling for what has to be hours after the call ends. He feels restless and let horribly fatigued in the same moment, and while usually he would pass these sorts of nights playing games or mindlessly traversing the internet on his phone, the thought of doing that now makes him sick to his stomach.

As he lays safe and sound in bed, he wonders if there’s any meaning to this life, if it’s one where such terrible things can happen.

Sleep, for once, is a long time coming.

>\- XV -<

“I’m glad you could join us,” Ms. Collins says. Her eyes are red rimmed, and she looks like much more time has passed than the two years it has been since Noct last saw her. “You can go sit down in the living room. We won’t be leaving for the service until three.”

“Right,” Noct watches her disappear into the depths of Jaden’s childhood home before stepping over the threshold himself. He never was over here much, considering that Jaden lived out of town and liked visiting Noct more because Noct’s house was actually close to all the places they liked to hang out.

Noct lingers in the entryway, taking more time than he probably ought to to look at the pictures hung on the wall. There’s a steady progression of Jaden growing up, from a baby on his mother’s hip to what looks like his elementary days to the more recognizable Jaden that Noct will… never see again.

Noct blinks back tears and crosses the entryway into the living room, leaving those reminders of Jaden behind. Noct moves to sit on the couch, and startles when he realizes that what he thought was a pillow leaning against the armrest is actually a sleeping dog.

“Oh, that’s just Umbra. He doesn’t bite,” Ms. Collins says, drifting through the room from one doorway to the other. “He’ll shake your hand if you ask nicely.”

The dog yawns noisily and lifts his head, fixing bright amber eyes on Noct. Umbra huffs and stands, slipping a little as the couch cushion bends under his weight. He looks at Noct almost expectantly.

“Oh, uh,” Noct holds out his hand, palm up. “Hey boy. Wanna give me some paw?”

The dog barks once, loud and sharp, and lifts his paw.

In an instant, the world bends and twists. Noct falls as the couch disappears from under him, his knees meeting what definitely does not feel like the carpet the couch sat on. He closes his eyes to block out the incomprehensible mash of colors his surroundings have turned into.

“Noct! Hey guys, he’s back!”

Noctis cracks his eyes open against a bright light that wasn’t there a second ago. When he blinks again, the world resolves.

He’s kneeling on a circle of metal with a white glowing ring etched into its surface. It’s embedded into stone, which is making up some sort of outcropping beside a river.

There’s a river. He’s outside.

“What the hell?” Noct frowns and looks around, his breath shuddering out of him when he sees the three men coming up the rise.

“You’ve _got_ to stop stepping onto every glowy thingy you find, man. You were gone for like a whole day!” The short blond one says, coming to a stop in front of Noct and reaching out a hand. “We were getting worried!”

“You have certainly never vanished for so long before,” the one with glasses remarks. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

Noct doesn’t know what to say. He knows these men, he knows what they look like and what their voices sound like, but he doesn’t _know_ them. He doesn’t know anything about them. He doesn’t even know their names. He’s been dreaming of them for years and he doesn’t _know_ …

Is he asleep?

Noct goes to pinch his left wrist, but he has some sort of weird leather armguard on it. He pinches the other instead.

It hurts. He doesn’t wake up.

“Noct?” The tattooed one prompts him for a reply. Noct notes, in a vague sort of way, that he isn’t wearing a shirt. It’s almost funny compared to the way the one with glasses is so buttoned-up and proper looking. Noct never really thought of how weird that was, even when he would draw them side by side. It’s just what felt right, the shirt-phobic style of dress.

“Are you good?” The blond one asks. He still has his hand out, but it’s starting to falter.

Noct licks his lips. Considers all the questions he has. Takes a breath, then another. “I’m sorry but… who are you?”

**Author's Note:**

> Hello folks, welcome to my first Bad Things Happen Bingo fill. What square am I filling? You’ll see ;)  
> It ain’t over yet, so stay tuned


End file.
